Women hit the streets from Kabul to Mexico City on Wednesday to mark International Women's Day and stand up for rights that are coming under increasing attack.

With Afghanistan's Taliban rulers imposing what the United Nations has called a "gender apartheid" on women, Iran's repression of the Mahsa Amini protests, new US restrictions on abortion rights and the Ukraine war, protesters were fuelled by a sense that hard-won progress is being turned back.

Two people were killed and several others injured Tuesday in a train accident north of Cairo, Egypt's health ministry said after the country's latest rail tragedy.

A ministry statement said there were "two dead in the train accident at Qalyub, while the injured are in a stable condition."

An earlier ministry toll that reported one dead also listed 16 injured, including six already treated and released.

The incident occurred in Qalyub, just north of the capital Cairo in the Nile Delta.

Israeli warplanes killed three people in a raid on Syria's Aleppo airport Tuesday, a war monitor said after the strike which, according to a Syrian official, halted earthquake aid flights.

The airport has been a major conduit for relief flights since a February 6 earthquake devastated swathes of southeastern Turkey and neighbouring Syria.

A transport ministry official in Syria said the aid flights were among those brought to a stop from Aleppo, Syria's second city.

Israeli troops on Tuesday killed six Palestinians in Jenin including an alleged militant accused of killing two Israelis, the latest deadly raid in a surge of violence in the occupied West Bank.

The Palestinian health ministry said six men had been killed, one aged 49 and the rest in their 20s, in clashes that the army said included soldiers launching shoulder-fired rockets amid ferocious gunfire.

Where brutal jihadists once ruled in Iraq, church bells rang out on Tuesday, a symbol of hope, reconstruction, and unity.

"They ring for everyone," the UN's cultural chief Audrey Azoulay said on a visit to the northern metropolis of Mosul, Iraq's second city.

Her agency, UNESCO, is rebuilding churches, mosques and other buildings devastated by the Islamic State group's three-year occupation of a city known for its religious and cultural diversity.

Syrian medics launched Tuesday the first cholera vaccination campaign in the rebel-held northwest since a deadly outbreak began last year, amid increased fears of contagion after last month's devastating earthquake.

Health workers were going door to door to inoculate people in homes and displacement camps in the Idlib region, the war-torn country's last main rebel bastion, an AFP correspondent said.

Syria's first cholera outbreak since 2009 has killed at least 26 people in areas outside Syrian regime control since September, according to Idlib health official Zuhair Karrat.

Denmark, an active foreign aid donor, on Tuesday slammed as a "total embarrassment" the fact rich nations have failed to raise a promised $100 billion a year to help poor countries battle climate change.

Dan Jorgensen, Denmark's development minister, told the UN Least Developed Countries summit that "trillions" would be needed in coming decades to control the fallout from rising temperatures.

The impact of a heating planet on the world's 46 poorest nations has been a key topic at the summit in Doha that ends Thursday.

Iran announced Tuesday it had made the first arrests in a spate of mystery poisonings of schoolgirls that has affected more than 5,000 pupils since late November.

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had called Monday for the perpetrators of the "unforgivable crime" to be tracked down "without mercy" as public anger mounts.

The interior ministry said in a statement on Tuesday "a number of people" suspected of manufacturing hazardous substances had been arrested in six provinces, including a pupil's parent.

Qatar's emir named his top diplomat as prime minister Tuesday and brought in a new interior minister in what observers called the completion of a changing of the guard in the wealthy Gulf state.

The ruler's office announced that Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani had accepted "the resignation" of prime minister and interior minister Sheikh Khalid bin Khalifa bin Abdulaziz Al Thani.

Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani was named as the new head of government and was sworn-in within hours of the change, state media reported.

Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said Tuesday he hoped to "strengthen and broaden" relations with Iraq, on a Baghdad visit ahead of the 20th anniversary of the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Defense Secretary Austin also told Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani that US troops were "ready to remain" in the country at Baghdad's invitation, a thorny issue that has divided public opinion in both countries.